Just hours before the planned execution of Lisa Montgomery, a convicted murderer and the first woman to impose a federal death sentence in nearly seven decades, a federal judge suspended it late Monday in anticipation of a review of mental powers. .
A date for such a trial was not given immediately, and prosecutors filed a notice to appeal the decision.
Kelley Henry, a Montgomery lawyer, 52, said she suffered from a serious mental illness “exacerbated by the age of sexual torture she suffered under supervision.” Psychiatric experts submitted affidavits as part of her appeal, claiming she could not understand the basis for her execution.
“Mrs Montgomery is deteriorating mentally and we are looking for an opportunity to prove her incompetence,” Henry said in a statement.
The execution of Montgomery, scheduled for Tuesday, was one of three scheduled by the Department of Justice this week. It was in the twilight of Trump’s presidency and a few days before the inauguration of President Joe Biden.
Biden has suggested that he place a moratorium on the federal death penalty.
In December 2004, Montgomery, then 36 and living in Kansas, crossed state lines to the Missouri home of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, whom she met at a dog show, federal prosecutors said. Stinnett was eight months pregnant.
Montgomery strangled Stinnett with a rope and used a kitchen knife she had brought from home to remove the fetus, court documents show. The little girl survived. Montgomery tried to surrender her as her own, but was quickly arrested and later convicted by a jury and unanimously sentenced to death.
Montgomery is locked up in a federal prison for women in Fort Worth, Texas, where staff are trained to deal with mental health issues. Her lawyers say they are not arguing that she did not deserve to be punished, but that the jury never fully learned of her serious mental illnesses diagnosed by doctors.
In a nearly 7,000-page petition filed in honor of President Donald Trump, her lawyers say her mother’s alcoholism caused her brain damage and caused ‘incurable and significant psychiatric disabilities’. They also outlined Montgomery’s allegations of physical abuse, rape and torture by her stepfather and others and sex trafficking by her mother.
“Everything about this case is overwhelmingly sad,” the petition reads. “If people want to turn us away. It’s easy to call Mrs Montgomery angry and a monster, as the government does. She is not either.”
Diane Mattingly, an older sister from Montgomery, told reporters last week that she also had sexual abuse in the home before being placed in foster care. She has spoken out in recent months that her sister’s life should be spared.
“I went to a place where I was loved and cared for and showed self-worth,” Mattingly said. “I had a good foundation. Lisa didn’t, and she broke. She literally broke.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge’s decision to stay the execution. In October, the agency described the case as a ‘particularly heinous’ murder. The Missouri community where her victim lived gathered last month to remember Stinnett, with some support for Montgomery’s execution.
The U.S. government last executed a prisoner in 1953 when Bonnie Brown Heady of Missouri was killed for kidnapping and murdering a young boy in a ransom.
Montgomery was initially scheduled to be executed in December, but the date was delayed after her attorneys in Nashville, Tennessee contracted the coronavirus amid the trip to Texas and are working on the case.
The spread of Covid-19 across prisons, including the Terre Haute, Indiana, where all federal executions take place, has contributed to growing criticism of the resumption of the federal death penalty last year under the Trump administration, even as the states came to a standstill . to executions.
Apart from the execution of Montgomery, two other federal executions will take place this week. So far, the government has killed ten people in the past seven months, which amounts to the most executions in a presidential paralyzed period in more than 130 years.
